Once again, I am on the train from the capital of culture to the capital of politics, from Chemnitz to Berlin. As I make this journey rather frequently, and because the Deutschlandticket limits me to local and regional trains, I like to vary the route from time to time. Sometimes I change trains in Elsterwerda, sometimes in Jüterbog, and today in Dessau.
The train is pretty packed already, so I have to decide quickly whom to sit next to. I like to choose people reading books. Or old people, because they have interesting stories to tell.
There is a young couple, recognizably from Israel. They are speaking Hebrew, and the boy is wearing a kippah. I sit down next to them, if only to prevent an anti-Semite from joining them at the next stop and ruining their journey.
Because I am not only forward-thinking like this and ever considerate of the well-being of all fellow human beings, but also polite, I greet them in Hebrew. This allows the two travelers to realize that I understand their language and to adjust their conversation accordingly, so as not to divulge any private or state secrets.
But the youthful voyagers seem to be on their honeymoon, because they keep conversing lovingly and laughingly.
Or they realized that my Hebrew is not that good. I have forgotten most of what I learned, and now only understand the numbers, as well as the words for beer (בירה), pizza (פיצה) and kibbutz (קיבוץ). Just what you need for a trip around the Holy Land. And the word “אצטרובל” [itstrubál] for a pine cone. It’s funny how the brain works. Many of the things I want to learn and memorize don’t stick. But that one word, which I heard more than 25 years ago in Ben Shemen forest, has occupied a brain cell as doggedly as an Israeli settler in the West Bank.
Almost as sweet as the word “אצטרובל” are the names of the places we pass:
Jeber-Bergfrieden.
Bad Belzig.
Borkheide.
Beelitz-Heilstätten.
Ah, now I finally know where this famous “lost place” is.
Brandenburg is like Upper Egypt. Some interesting ruins, but the rest is sand, and a flood every few years. (Upper Egypt is the part of Egypt which is at the bottom of the map, by the way. Just like Upper Bavaria or Upper Volta.)
I am digressing a bit, because I want to delay the inevitable. In fact, I would even prefer to redirect the train, if I could. Because I know which place we will pass soon.
“Well,” I tell myself, “they’re young people. That doesn’t mean anything to them anymore.” Besides, they are very happy and joking with each other. Probably not a honeymoon, after all, but the beautiful time before that fatal mistake that many people make despite my constant warnings.
If anyone finds this too negative: I am on my way to the family court, because two parents have been arguing for months about the days they see their son. Actually, people willing to marry and, above all, to procreate should be obliged to watch how quickly love turns into hate, before they are allowed to say “I do”. That’s probably why proceedings at the family court are closed to the public, as are only espionage trials. The state, concerned about the population pyramid, does not want people to learn the truth.
Wilhelmshorst.
Potsdam-Rehbrücke.
Potsdam-Babelsberg.
“Our next stop is Berlin-Wannsee. Exit to the right of the train.”
The girl next to me winces: “? ואנזה בגרמניה” (Wannsee is in Germany?)
I realize that Wannsee is just one of many Holocaust sites that she heard about at school. And because some of the most well-known of these – Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Babi Yar, Majdanek – are located far to the east, the impression sometimes arises that the murder happened far away from the land of the murderers.
Perhaps that is why Germans appreciate these memorials in Eastern Europe so much. You can make a duty-bound trip there once, and then tell yourself that back home in Münster or Bremen or Fulda no one could have suspected, let alone known, anything about the Holocaust.
That is why I do not think much of carting all German school classes to Auschwitz, as is regularly suggested by politicians and by coach companies. They should go to Sachsenhausen if they are from Berlin. To Dachau if they are from Munich. To Neuengamme if they are from Hamburg. To Grafeneck if they are from the Swabian Alb. To Flossenbürg if they are from the Upper Palatinate. With thousands of concentration camps, Gestapo prisons, forced labor camps, euthanasia and other killing sites, you really don’t have to look far in Germany to see how ubiquitous genocide and other crimes were.
At the train station in Wannsee, they didn’t even bother to change the old signs. It still gives me the creeps each time I pass by.
Links:
- You can also get to Wannsee by taking the highly recommended Spandau hiking trail (part 1, part 2).
- But Müggelsee is a much more beautiful, peaceful and humane lake.
- More railway stories.
- Yet more stories from Berlin.
- And for those who are into more serious stuff, there is more about history and about the Holocaust.
The Happy Hermit 
Not to forget Buchenwald, where the contrast with Weimar, the city of Goethe and Schiller, in the valley below is inescapable. My wife remembers being taken there with the rest of her class as a school pupil aged sixteen, and visiting Sachsenhausen with her parents.
Brave parents who take their child to such a memorial site!
Mine never did, although I grew up not too far from Flossenbürg. It’s not that they were against remembering or that the subject was taboo – although they once told me to better not raise the issue with grandfather -, it just seemed that they didn’t quite know how to deal with it and were quite happy to leave it to the school. Or to me going to the library and learning by myself.
I have to confess, I have not yet been to Weimar or Buchenwald, although I sometimes spot the Buchenwald tower from the train, when I travel between Jena and Erfurt.
But to me, this is a place where I can’t just stop by on an afternoon. I need to take a few days off and try to wrap my head around the things I will see and especially the contrast you mentioned.
Hab herzlichen Dank, Andreas, für diesen eindrücklichen Bericht, der mich zum Nachdenken bringt!
Very interesting. I’m impressed that you were able to understand her, and even more that you know איצטרובל!!!
As an aside (since you love history): I don’t know if you heard, but Eichmann’s executioner (he only became known about 30 years after it happened) passed away last week.
Well, it just shows that my vocabulary is not only very limited, but the little that I remember is absolutely useless. :-)
I didn’t know about the executioner. One of the few executioners who never must have worried for a second about having put an innocent man to death, I guess.
It reminds me of a discussion I once had at the Birkbeck Law Society after the screening of a movie about the Eichmann trial:
In actuality, he suffered for years from nightmares. They only stopped after 30 years or so.
He was a Yemenite Jew. Eichmann’s guards were all Jews who were not from European backgrounds, as Israel wanted to ensure that they would act professionally and not let totally understandable human emotions interfere with their job.
It’s actually useful to know איצרובל. They have a flammable substance in them which make them very good for help in making a BBQ whern you’re roaming around and don’t have other materials handy.
I love travelling Europe by train, especially the older style ones with compartments that seat 6 and have a luggage rack overhead. I’ve had the best time conversing with train-mates even when we collectively had hardly any native language in common. Sometimes the conversation is very enlightining, sometimes more pleasantries, but usually quite interesting. The only bad experience I ever had was sharing an overnight car from Basle to Berlin with three guys from the US. Those guys had two days with nothing to do and thought ‘There must be something interesting to do there, Berlin is a pretty big place”!!! I was embarrassed that they were my countrymen. They were otherwise boarish and spent the whole night laughing and talking – no one else could sleep.
Thanks for posting this about Wannsee. I did not go there when I went to help tear down the wall. I have only been to Dachau. One day, I still want to find the resettlement camp in Kassell, where my in-laws (an Hungarian slave laborer and a German from Stuttgart) lived when my son’s father was born.
You are so right, people need to know that the camps were not only in the east.
That sounds like a very dramatic family story there!
A lot of these former Nazi or post-war camps were demolished, built over over used for other purposes, with most people forgetting (or pretending to forget) what they used to be.
But in the last 20 or 30 years, many local initiatives have begun to reconstruct the history, try to preserve buildings and other evidence, establish memorials, and do lots of valuable research and educational work.
I am often surprised and impressed, when, stopping in a small town to change trains or even on walks through the countryside, I suddenly notice a memorial or some information boards, set up by a local history group, by a school, or by the municipality.
There are thousands of those examples. Even on the walk to Wannsee, I came across one, in Falkensee: https://andreas-moser.blog/2023/10/03/spandauer-weg-tag-1/ (chapters 28 et seq.)